POLITICALLY CORRECT SEX, A Musical Comedy

Barry Grace (a former director of the Irish Film Board) wrote the music, I the comedy. Click on the songs you want to listen to—and here for some snippets.

COREY prefers her fantasies to being with a real man: this one is a dance about being raped by Attila the Hun and his men. Then she kicks Attila off and sings all about the problems that come with A Real Man.

Her boyfriend CONOR is a feckless young man—“Not an ounce of feck in him”—who avoids involvement, doesn’t pay his debts and sings a hymn to Oh, Money!

COREY and their friends are trying to get him to take more responsibility but, “No no no,” he protests, “you’re trying to give me a character! If I had a character I’d be a screaming claustrophobic! I have no ‘me’! The hard things I’ve had to do without a ‘me’, and the best ones—lift it away. He sings The Heart Is a Kite.

He confesses one of his nightmares and we go into disaster-movie mode for Attack of the Giant Feminists as huge women ravage the landscape. CONOR and his friends CAL and CORNELIUS take shelter in a bar, recognize the passing leg of one of the attackers as someone who gave them an STD, and sing You Mugged Me, My Love.

Drunk, they decide what these women need is a good fuck. They creep into the enemy camp where the giantesses lie sleeping and engage with huge yonis, but are discovered and pounded like ants at a picnic. CONOR is taken prisoner and strapped to a table by COREY, CASSIE, a butch roller-derby girl, and CAREN, a blonde model, real dumb. CASSIE reaps away CONOR’S thing—“You’ll feel better now”—and displays it in a jar. “She’s right! I feel great!” says CONNOR, and he sings Never Complain, Never Explain.

So ecstatic is CONOR that this was only a dream that he holds a fat girls contest. CAL enters with a huge date and sings Hate Mate’s Weight? (We don’t have this one recorded yet.) The fat women dance to While Standing at the Vernissage. One of them sits on a toilet and goes through the rotten wood to the apartment below, where the neighbors are pounding on the ceiling over the noise. She lands so hard that she can’t get the bowl off, and is taken away by ambulance attendants, who have to knock down a wall.

But someone has brought COREY to the party: she sees that “fat” is the theme, and concludes that she is fat. CONOR, who loves her, is in agony to persuade her that she isn’t fat. It’s a woman thing, he says. Why don’t you try it, she says. I’d like to, he says, and CAL, who’s a medical student, says his professor can bring it off—it’s a brain-transplant procedure. COREY sings a love song about CONOR, I Suddenly Find, but we don’t have it recorded yet.

The SURGEON (Einstein wig) says, “I have developed a post-Freudian science of the mind.” “Why are you so down on Freud?” “Freud swallowed Darwin whole! The id is just the monkey within!” “So what’s wrong with Darwin?” “It’s pure mythology. Doesn’t hold a drop of water.” “Then who are we? What are we?” “Well, the scientific answer, Doctor, is—we don’t know.” He sings The Accidental Monkey, and they dance the monkey dance.

CONOR persuades dumb-blonde-model CAREN to trade bodies with him, and they sing What a Strange Thing Am I (coming soon). But when they do the operation they don’t find a brain in CAREN; her mental functions are confined to a few synaptic gaps. “Is she a model? You should have told me! It wouldn’t be fair—what would she get out of it.” When she wakes she says, “So whom am I?”

CONOR’S brain is now in a jar hooked up to a speaker and a videocam, and volunteers to trade bodies parade before him. One of them, CORNELIUS, who’s been hinting all along that he’s gay, cavorts in drag, and looks so good that CONOR mistakes him for a woman, chooses “her”—and wakes up still a man!

CORNELIUS is happy to have become a handsome man with bigger equipment, and sings Song of Sodomy. But CONOR is miserable in CORNELIUS’S body. On a subway platform he sees COREY about to jump in front of a train—her love for him has broken her heart—and stops her just in time, though she doesn’t recognize him right away. Together they sing Human Joy Takes Many Forms. Rather than throw her life away, why doesn’t she trade bodies with him?—if he can get his own back.

The SURGEON is indignant, but she’s willing, and sings the love song, Do You Have to Be a Woman? And CORNELIUS wants his own body back. “You’re just too tight, honey! I’m getting a hemorrhoid!” CONOR is horrified: “What have you been doing with my body?” Well, he’s made certain improvements, and sings Unfellatable, to the approximate tune of Unforgettable.

When the operation is over CORNELIUS is so happy to be himself again that he sings Me.

COREY and CONOR, now in each other’s bodies, explore the differences in sexual feeling, sing Suggest, In Fact Request, and decide to get married—but first they want their own bodies back. The SURGEON agrees reluctantly, but a plug gets kicked out in the operating room, and CONOR—dies. But they bring him back. The SURGEON wants to know what it’s like on the other side but CONOR, still half-dead, just sings Enticing Dreams.

Then, in the face of the SURGEON’S persistent questions, he begins to sing:

Oh, I got to the light,I arrived at the height,And a loverly sightIt was too.But I had to come back,Yes I had to come back,I just had to come back(to COREY)To you.(stronger)I crossed the wide chasm,Became ectoplasmAnd found the orgasmWas long overdue -But I had to come back,I had to come back,I had to come backTo you.(He pinches her behind. She squeals.)

COREYHe spurned the effulgence -Preferred the indulgenceOf sticking his bulgenceIn one tried and true -

ALL(to COREY)So he had to come back,He had to come back,He had to come backTo you.

SURGEONHe found, after jumping,He still missed the humping,And felt there was sumpingHe had left to do -

ALL(to COREY)So he had to come back,He had to come back,He had to come backTo you.

CALThere was ice cream forever,Remarks ultra-cleverAnd sex with whoeverYou wanted to do -

ALL(to COREY)But he had to come back,He had to come back,He had to come backTo you.

CONOR(now totally alive, to CAREN)Oh, I love to love you(to CASSIE)And I love to love you(to the various audience members)And I love to love you,And you and you,(to COREY)But I had to come back,I had to come back,I had to come backTo you!

ALLYes, he had to come back,He had to come back,He had to come back(to COREY)To you.